Damien Jurado has just announced that his next album, titled Brothers and Sisters of the Eternal Son, will be released by Secretly Canadian on January 21, 2014. This is the Seattle songsmith’s eleventh full-length release and his third with producer Richard Swift, a period of collaborative recording that I am dubbing Damien Jurado’s Green Period (the “green” is for growth).
In order to get you all excited about this release, the label published an essay about the album written by Father John Misty that begins, “Damien is out of his goddamn mind.” It also released a trailer for the album, in which Jurado talks about the album while driving a rental car to Swift’s studio in rural Oregon. There are lots of shots of lush greenery, overturned logging trucks and Swift lighting afire a mighty joint. There are also some tantalizing snippets of the album.
For those who don’t want to spoil the album by hearing snippets, or those too busy for a six-minute video, I have compiled a list of the trailer’s 10 most important quotes, most from Jurado, a couple from Swift. Enjoy!
1. “Mariqopa, my last record, was based on a dream I had about a guy who disappears into the desert.”
2. “This new record is sort of a sequel to Mariqopa…. It’s about a guy who disappears on a search, if you will, for himself, and never goes home.”
3. “Besides being a great engineer, Richard Swift is also a great artist. The whole recording environment is just fun.”
4. “I used to dread making records. I don’t anymore. That’s all changed.”
5. “I’m going to warn you right now, I’m a terrible interview.”
6. “We really love reggae records, especially dub records. So the idea is that we had kind of made a reggae record—not that it’s reggae, but the same mentality—and now we’re starting to dub it out.”
7. “The record before was a ball of Silly Putty and now we’re taking it and just stretching it out.”
8. “It’s kind of groovy and weird and interesting. You can sing along to it.”
9. “I air-drum to it way too much.”
10. “I feel about, not just my songs, but what happens here in the studio, it is limitless. There is no ceiling to it.”
